There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.
Küche für Alle [Kitchen for all] from Marc Menningmann on Vimeo. Next to discussing and presenting, people also ate and cooked on the Degrowth Conference which took place in Leipzig last year. The "Kitchen for all" is a group of People's kitchens which cooked for and with the conference participants to provide food every lunch and dinner.
How to sell degrowth is one of the questions of our research and communication project Postwachstumspioniere at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research. In the paper “Successful non-growing companies“, Andrea Liesen, Christian Dietsche and myself are discussing motives and strategies that seem to apply to a variety of non-growing companies. We found that small and medium-sized [...]
By Ulrich Brand “Business as usual” is the motto of ruling politics nowadays. The dominant public discussions and policies are staged as necessities and unavoidable adaptions to an austerity policy which is apparently without alternatives. We are assured that rising poverty-rates, the redistribution of wealth from bottom to top and the cutback of social rights and democracy are only te...
